Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.

I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.

I use it in Windows Terminal when in a cmd.exe shell (as opposed to a PowerShell or Git Bash shell)

I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.

There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.

Ironically, pixel art today is the affordable default for indie games.

Maybe not for long. It seems to be the art style most difficult to get right for diffusion models.

Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.

Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.

I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.

And some studios will go that route.

All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.

Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon

It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.

Nobody can afford not to use it

The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail

I think it is, again, a way to work around limitations. Economic limitations in this case rather than technical.

Compared to modern HD graphics, pixel art is more affordable because you can hide a lot of details you would normally have to work on behind these fat pixels.

And the most interesting trick, to me, is that pixel art looks sharp! The non-CRT-like square pixels is a feature.

Blurry usually doesn't look good, it is as if your eyes can't focus, or that you are looking through a dirty window, it naturally registers as a problem. Real life has details and you are missing them. With sharp pixel boundaries, you are telling the brain "there is no problem with your eyes, everything is fine".

It is not the only way of introducing artificial details to make low detail pictures look fine: scanline effect, screen door effect, ostensible dithering, etc... But pixel art is a good compromise, in addition to being a recognizable somewhat nostalgic art style.

That's my theory at least.

Note that classical pixel art was not necessary particularly fat/blocky. Since SVGA become common, games like SimCity 2000 or Transport Tycoon Deluxe run in 640x480 on 14" CRT, which is ~60 DPI. Later (in second half of 1990s), higher resolution became common, but also higher screen sizes, so DPI was in 70-80 range. That is not really that different from full HD on 24" LCD (~92 DPI), which dominated later era.

This seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.

The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).

VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.

The sharpness of the pixel is in the display connector, not the resolution.

If you assume a SD CRT, as the article does, then yes, the display connection makes the most difference (although there are still differences between individual CRTs).

But that does not cover all CRTs relevant to pixel art. If you display low resolution art on a CRT designed for high resolutions it makes a big difference in pixel sharpness.

If you use RF or composite on a high res screen, including LCD or OLED, the result would be similarly fuzzy.

But in practice, VGA and SVGA CRTs always used RGB connections, so that's not relevant to games.

In Europe, TV CRTs and game consoles also commonly used RGB connections (SCART), so the distinction between CRT and connection matters.

Those are the SD CRTs the article talks about, not the VGA or SVGA CRTs used to play DOS games.

Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts to diverge, and things can get a little blurry or color-fringey.

What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.

But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.

if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications.

CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp.

It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.

CRTs almost never show the entire frame at all. The phosphor decay on a typical television CRT is so rapid that by the time the beam hits the right-hand side of any given scanline, the left side is completely dark.

And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.

The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.

That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on".

The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.

If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.

Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.

Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy.

Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).

Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.

I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.

CRTs emit gamma ray at high power(>5kV is usually the quoted figure), and the standard solution was a bandaid fix of attaching leaded gamma ray blocking glass onto the screen. This high lead glass cannot be recycled, and the EU(rightfully) don't like any of that. I don't know if manufacturing of CRTs are banned or legally infeasible, but it's clearly not encouraged.

There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.

There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.

Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.

First weight. Then resolution. I think SoTA for CRTs peaked at early HD resolution 720. One might be able to modulate the beam faster now. Size. And safety - anyone starting up production now would have to solve the safety issues from scratch. Nothing like a few cubic feet of vacuum imploding to ruin your day.

CRT monitors up to 1600×1200 were available and 1280×1024 was very common.

I think plasma displays are a much better option. We really should bring them back. The latest generation of plasma TVs drove their active elements at frequencies in excess of 600hz. You could do a lot of clever things with these panels. They are basically digital CRTs.

A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.

Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.

Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutions

True by design.

and purely digital interfaces,

True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille).

ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio

True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.

and completely square pixels.

This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.)

Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.

My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.

I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?

And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.

My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.

If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?

These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?

Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.

Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.

Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.

There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.

This is a great post. Also reminded me of a video I saw a few months ago that was equally as entertaining (and somewhat informative): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr

It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.

Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.

You can’t simulate the motion clarity of CRTs (yet).

You don't want to simulate the god-awful flicker my CRT has at 60Hz.

I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.

Pixel art, for me, is the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced which I never played on a CRDT.

Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.

Hear hear. I’m so tired of this pixel art elitism (exhibited in the article) which asserts with certainty that our fondness for pixel art comes from viewing it distorted on CRTs.

The Game Boy was insanely popular, is part of many people’s introduction to and fondness for pixel art, and it had an LCD screen.

This is not elitism, it's about historical accuracy. This is how many remember the games of their youth.

And not just that; invoking the Game Boy here is not the closer many people think it is, given that its STN LCD screen was fuzzy (e. g. ghosting) yet also had this distinct, subdued lo-fi glow, almost like looking through a zoetrope. Somewhat analog to lo-fi CRT setups.

CRTs are to video games what vinyl is to music and celluloid is to cinema. The flaws associated with the physical medium have become the defining aesthetic, such that a new medium which removes those flaws feels "sterile" and "hollow", like a concrete-slab brutalist building. There's also the sense of nostalgia. Rock music was less commercialized, or perceived as less commercialized, at the peak of the vinyl era (1960s-1970s). Computers and video games were more fun at the peak of the CRT era (1980s-1990s). So our brains kind of do this substitution wherein "warm fuzzy feelings we associate when X was popular" -> "X is better".

All I know is that when CDs hit the market I savored the additional detail they provided. A good, non-loudness-crushed recording had so many sumptuous highs I used to reach my fingers out and try to "feel" the consonants and vowels of the vocals. And when LCD monitors began to supplant CRTs my eyes were relieved at the additional sharpness. I remember these transition points, so I can say definitively that there was a time when we thought the newer stuff was indeed an improvement.

Somebody had better let know Nintendo they were doing pixel art wrong for the GB/A, this guy has Opinions. Pokemon is such a fake aesthetic, the only authentic and pure pixel art is whatever bullshit that happens to be exactly what the writer made.